“... by them: the one naturally follows the other, as the overnight cell follows the police blotter. Robert Lowell was a rather unsavoury fellow; therefore we should not be surprised by the ‘irresponsible obscurity’ (Carey’s phrase) of his verse. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, Carey moves swiftly from quoting unpleasant and fascistic comments about ...”

“... not straight ethnography, however: Segalen had a case to make, the same case that Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson had made before him, against the degradation of native life which had set in, first with the coming of Christian missionaries to the islands early in the 19th century, and then with the onset of a colonial administration. The Maoris had ...”

“... nights, criminal operations and complicated political double-dealing. The collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach pointed out in 1943 that it was an ideal setting for detective stories, and Patrick Marnham’s gripping book is a detective story of sorts. It recounts the life of a man who was, in himself, particularly opaque. Jean Moulin was ambitious and ...”

“... put to work as a response to the much-touted decline of civil society analysed, for example, in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. They are telling us, at this moment of extreme vulnerability, that corporate America (or international finance), in partnership with infinite reserves of personal charity, was creating a wonderful life that has now so tragically ...”

“... lives. Scotland is a place where cultural artefacts and past battles – the Stone of Destiny, Robert Burns, Braveheart, Bannockburn – have more impact on people’s sense of moral action than politics does. The people have no real commitment to the public sphere, and are not helped towards any such commitment by the dead rhetoric of the young ...”

“... to these technological developments, and there are even attempts to downgrade their significance. Robert Kubicek argues that in numerous armed clashes between the British and local peoples between 1875 and 1907, ‘both sides had modern weaponry.’ So they did, but Winston Churchill was appalled by the one-sided slaughter at the Battle of Omdurman in ...”

“... stopped years ago. My laboratory now tests its capabilities by using samples provided by the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. No one has asked me recently whether my electron microscope is still working. To be fair, guidelines are being prepared for action in the event of a deliberate release of smallpox. They assume that it is very unlikely to happen ...”

“... case, a technical prerequisite. You need an A-bomb to ignite an H-bomb, and the lab’s Director Robert Oppenheimer reasonably enough felt that the race to forestall the Nazis required no distractions from the main lines of development. Destructive friction between fusion and fission was reduced by giving Teller what was essentially a roaming brief, and it ...”

“... in the age of rising nationalisms. ‘The Hungarians were first and last only Hungarians,’ Robert Musil wrote in The Man without Qualities, ‘and counted only incidentally . . . as also Austro-Hungarians. The Austrians, on the other hand, were primarily nothing at all . . . there was not even a proper word for it. And there was no such thing as ...”

“... and country in the 1590s, had sought to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary pressure to the same end in 1641. Adamson’s account bears out ...”

“... by ACLEFEU. So, by and large, does Marie-George Buffet, the Communist contender, whose predecessor Robert Hue fared disastrously in 2002. Buffet is the self-styled candidate of the ‘popular anti-liberal left’: a left-of-socialist coalition that failed to come together at the end of last year, enabling the Communists to appropriate the title, which always ...”

“... him in handcuffs and chains, and fly him to a destination where they know he will be tortured. As Robert Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East, has commented, ‘we pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our partner countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on civilian transport to a third country where, let’s make no bones about it, they ...”

“... The soundtrack might be Muddy Waters singing ‘You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had’ or Robert Johnson’s ‘Drunken Hearted Man’. Repetition, sexual boasting, showy licks and riffs: the novel has it all. There is even a touch of satanic folklore, in the shape of a ghostly hobo rumoured to be the devil himself. While not exactly ...”

“... Galip, are esoteric commentaries on Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Mathnawi – a 13th-century work which Robert Irwin has described as ‘a great sprawling series of stories within stories’ in which ‘the inner stories . . . indicate the mystical meanings of the outer stories’ – the reader’s head starts to throb. It’s also true that Borges-style novels ...”

“... say, catching an old fish and staring at it and then just letting it go? As Elizabeth Bishop told Robert Lowell, ‘I find I’m really a minor female ...”